Chapter IX (2)

With warmest congratulations to Mrs. Howells that you _and_ she were born, I am ever yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

Mr. Howells called such letters "whoops of blessing." When a new book pleased James particularly, he was apt to send a "whoop" to its author.

With respect to the next letter, it will be recalled that Croom Robertson was the Editor of "Mind." Richard Hodgson was later for many years the Secretary of the American Branch of the Society for Psychical Research, in Boston. He became a warm friend. Other allusions to him occur later.

_To G. Croom Robertson._

_Aug. 13, 1886_.

MY DEAR ROBERTSON,--...I have just been reading the last number of "Mind," and find it rather below par. R. Hodgson muddled, clotted, dusky and ineffectual, save for a gleam or two of light in as many separate points. How can an adult man spend his time in trying to torture an accurate meaning into Spencer's incoherent accidentalities? It is so much more easy to do the work over for oneself. I rubbed my eyes at the Macdonald paper, as a dim sense came over me that it might be a Divinity student who "sat under" me for a part of last year. I ween it is. Little did I know the viper I was nourishing. Why don't you have a special "Neo-Hegelian Department" in "Mind," like the "Children's Department" or the "Agricultural Department" in our newspapers--which educated readers skip? With Montgomery's paper I am for the most part in warm sympathy, though he might make a discrimination or two more. I'm sorry I've not yet read his first number. His non-empirical style, so different from that of the British school, will stand in the way of his views' deglutition by the ordinary reader. I've got the same stuff all neatly down in black and white, in a very empirical style, which alas! must wait perhaps years till the other chapters are finished. However, in these matters, no matter how much different men strike the same vein, they do it in such different _ways_, that no one of them absolutely supersedes the need of the others.

Davidson I saw the other day in Cambridge. He was fresh from the Concord School, where they had been belaboring Goethe as their _pièce de résistance_ and topping off with pantheism as dessert. He had read aloud a paper of Montgomery's against pantheism, as well as one of his own on Goethe's Titanism. Montgomery's is shortly to appear in a journal here. I am rather curious to read it.

To go on with "Mind," Hull's paper (Donaldson's) is refreshing. X---- is a little stub-and-twist fellow who also sat under me last year, and now has a fellowship for next year. He is a silent, mannerless little cub, but has first-rate stuff in him, I think, as an original worker; theological training. Have you had time yet to look into Royce's book? Royce seems to me to be a man of the greatest promise, performance too, in that book. I wish you would have it worthily reviewed.

Here I have run on about the accidents of the hour, instead of the eternal things of the soul. No matter; all is a symbol, and these words will probably waft my presence somehow into yours....

Pray drop me even a short line soon, to let me know about you and Mrs. Robertson. I've heard nothing _of_ you, even, for many months. Haven't you a brother, or something, to send over here, since there seems no hope of having you yourself? Gurney wrote the other day that he was about to send his brother.

Farewell! I think of you both often, and am with heartiest affection, Yours always,

WM. JAMES.

_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._

JAFFREY, N.H., _Sept. 12, 1886_.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--I ought long ere this to have written you a genuine letter in reply to your two of Feb. 3, _respective_ March 6. (The latter by the way came to me many weeks too late, all blurred and water-stained, with a notice gummed on it telling as how it had been rescued from the Oregon sunken on the bottom of the Ocean. This makes it ex-as well as in-trinsically interesting, and does honor to our nineteenth-century post-office perfection.) I suppose one reason for my procrastination has been the shrinking-back of the fleshly man from another gnashing of the teeth over the free-will business. I have just been reading your letters again, and beautiful letters they are--also your pregnant little paper on Monism. But I'm blest if they make me budge an inch from my inveterate way of looking at the question. I hate to think that controversy should be useless, and arguments of no avail, but the history of opinion on this problem is ominous; so I will be very short, hardly more than "yea, yea! nay, nay!"

The subject of my concern seems entirely different from yours. I care absolutely nothing whether there be "agents" or no agents, or whether man's actions be really "_his_" or not.

What I care for is that my moral reactions should find a real outward application. All those who, like you, hold that the world is a system of "uniform law" which repels all variation as so much "chaos," oblige, it seems to me, the world to be judged integrally. Now the only _integral_ emotional reaction which can be called forth by such a world as this of our experience, is that of dramatic or melodramatic interest--romanticism--which _is_ the emotional reaction upon it of all intellects who are neither religious nor moral. The moment you seek to go deeper, you must break the world into parts, the parts that seem good and those that seem bad. Whatever Indian mystics may say about overcoming the bonds of good and evil, for _us_ there is no higher synthesis in which their contradiction merges, no _one_ way of judging that world which holds them both. Either close your eyes and adopt an optimism or a pessimism equally daft; or exclude moral categories altogether from a place in the world's definition, which leaves the world _unheimlich_, reptilian, and foreign to man; or else, sticking to it that the moral judgment _is_ applicable, give up the hope of applying it to the _whole_, and admit that, whilst some parts are good, others are bad, and being bad, _ought_ not to have been, "argal," possibly _might_ not have been. In short, be an indeterminist on moral grounds with which the differences between compulsory or spontaneous uniformity and perceptive and conceptive order have absolutely nothing to do.

But enough! I am far beyond the yea and nay I promised, and feel more like gossiping with you as a friend than wrangling with you as a foe. I hope things are going well with you in these months and that politics have not exasperated you beyond the possibility of philosophizing.... I got successfully through the academic year, in spite of the fact that I wasted a great deal of time on "psychical research" and had other interruptions from work which I would fain have done. I intend _per fas aut nefas_ to make more time for myself next year. The family is very well; and with the exception of an attack of illness of a couple of weeks, the vacation has been a delightful and beneficial one. I wish I could live in the country all the year round, or rather nine months of it. When I retire from the harness, if that ever happens, I probably shall.

I have just been on a little trip to the White Mountains and may possibly buy a small farm which I saw in a convenient and romantic neighborhood. New England farms are now dirt cheap--the natives going West, the Irish coming in and making a better living than the Yankees could. Here were seventy-five acres of land, two thirds of it oak and pine timber, one third hay, a splendid spring of water, fair little house and large barn, close to a beautiful lake and under a mountain 3500 feet high, four and a half hours from Boston, for 900 dollars! A rivulet of great beauty runs through it. I am only waiting to see if I can get the strip between it and the lake shore to buy....

I have just read, with infinite zest and stimulation, Bradley's "Logic." I suppose you have read it. It is surely "epoch-making" in English philosophy. Both empiricists and pan-rationalists must settle their accounts with it. It breaks up all the traditional lines. And what a fighter the cuss is! Do you know him? What is he personally? Whether churlish and sour, or simply redundantly ironical and irrepressible, I can't make out from his polemic tone; but should apprehend the former. It will be long ere I settle my accounts with his book.

Well! adieu and good luck to you, in spite of your viciousness in the matter of determinism! Send me all you write and believe me as ever, Always most affectionately yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

With respect to the next letter, and others to James's sister, which follow, it should now be explained that Miss Alice James had gone abroad in 1885. The illness which was the cause of her journey developed more and more serious complications. Being near her brother Henry in England, she stayed on there during the remaining six years of her life. In spite of much suffering, she never let herself adopt an invalidish tone,[80] but kept her attention turned toward things outside her sick-room, and was apt to greet expressions of commiseration in a way to discourage their repetition--as the following letter testifies. "K. P. L." was a devoted friend, Miss Katharine P. Loring of Boston; "A. K." was the Aunt Kate mentioned in early letters.

_To his Sister._

CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 5, 1887_.

DEAREST ALICE,--Your card and, a day or two later, K. P. L.'s letter to A. K., have made us acquainted with your sad tumble-down, for which I am sorrier than I can express, and can only take refuge in the hope, incessantly springing up again from its ashes, that you will "recuperate" more promptly than of late has been the case. I'm glad, at any rate, that it has got you into Harry's lodgings for a while, and hope your next permanent arrangement will prove better than the last. When, as occasionally happens, I have a day of headache, or of real sickness like that of last summer at Mrs. Dorr's, I think of you whose whole life is woven of that kind of experience, and my heart sinks at the horizon that opens, and wells over with pity. But when all is over, the longest life appears short; and we had better drink the cup, whatever it contains, for it _is_ life. But I will not moralize or sympathize, for fear of awakening more "screams of laughter" similar to those which you wrote of as greeting my former attempts.

We have had but one letter from Harry--soon after his arrival at Florence. I hope he has continued to get pleasure and profit from his outing. I haven't written to him since he left London, nor do I now write him a special letter, but the rest of this is meant for him as well as you, and if he is still to be away, you will forward it to him. We are getting along very well, on the whole, I keeping very continuously occupied, but not seeming to get ahead much, _for the days grow so short_ with each advancing year. A day is now about a minute--hardly time to turn round in. Mrs. Gibbens arrived from Chicago last night, and in ten days she and Margaret will start, with our little Billy, for Aiken, S.C., to be gone till May. B. is asthmatic, she is glad to go south for her own sake, and the open-air life all day long will be much better for him than our arduous winter and spring. He is the most utterly charming little piece of human nature you ever saw, so packed with life, impatience, and feeling, that I think Father must have been just like him at his age....

I have been paying ten or eleven visits to a mind-cure doctress, a sterling creature, resembling the "Venus of Medicine," Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham,[81] made solid and veracious-looking. I sit down beside her and presently drop asleep, whilst she disentangles the snarls out of my mind. She says she never saw a mind with so many, so agitated, so restless, etc. She said my _eyes_, mentally speaking, kept revolving like wheels in front of each other and in front of my face, and it was four or five sittings ere she could get them _fixed_. I am now, _unconsciously to myself_, much better than when I first went, etc. I thought it might please you to hear an opinion of my mind so similar to your own. Meanwhile what boots it to be made unconsciously better, yet all the while consciously to lie awake o' nights, as I still do?

Lectures are temporarily stopped and examinations begun. I seized the opportunity to go to my Chocorua place and see just what was needed to make it habitable for the summer. It is a goodly little spot, but we may not, after all, fit up the buildings till we have spent a summer in the place and "studied" the problem a little more closely. The snow was between two and three feet deep on a level, in spite of the recent thaws. The day after I arrived was one of the most crystalline purity, and the mountain simply exquisite in gradations of tint. I have a tenant in the house, one Sanborn, who owes me a dollar and a half a month, but can't pay it, being of a poetic and contemplative rather than of an active nature, and consequently excessively poor. He has a sign out "Attorney and Pension Agent," and writes and talks like one of the greatest of men. He was working the sewing machine when I was there, and talking of his share in the war, and why he didn't go to live in Boston, etc. (namely that he wasn't known), and my heart was heavy in my breast that so rich a nature, fitted to inhabit a tropical dreamland, should have nothing but that furnitureless cabin within and snow and sky without, to live upon. For, however spotlessly pure and dazzlingly lustrous snow may be, pure snow, always snow, and naught but snow, for four months on end, is, it must be confessed, a rather lean diet for the human soul--deficient in variety, chiaroscuro, and oleaginous and medieval elements. I felt as I was returning home that some intellectual inferiority _ought_ to accrue to all populations whose environment for many months in the year consisted of pure snow.--You are better off, better off than you know, in that great black-earthed dunghill of an England. I say naught of politics, war, strikes, railroad accidents or public events, unless the departure of C. W. Eliot and his wife for a year in Europe be a public event....

Well, dear old Alice, I hope and pray for you. Lots of love to Harry, and if Katharine is with you, to her. Yours ever,

W. J.

_To Carl Stumpf._

CAMBRIDGE, _6 Feb., 1887_.

MY DEAR STUMPF,--Your two letters from Rügen of Sept. 8th, and from Halle of Jan. 2 came duly, and I can assure you that their contents was most heartily appreciated, and not by me alone. I fairly squealed with pleasure over the first one and its rich combination of good counsel and humorous commentary, and read the greater part of it to my friend Royce, assistant professor of philosophy here, who enjoyed it almost as much as I. There is a heartiness and solidity about your letters which is truly German, and makes them as nutritious as they are refreshing to receive. Your _Kater-Gefühl_,[82] however, in your second letter, about your _Auslassungen_[83] on the subject of Wundt, amused me by its speedy evolution into _Auslassungen_ more animated still. I can well understand why Wundt should make his compatriots impatient. Foreigners can afford to be indifferent for he doesn't _crowd_ them so much. He aims at being a sort of Napoleon of the intellectual world. Unfortunately he will never have a Waterloo, for he is a Napoleon without genius and with no central idea which, if defeated, brings down the whole fabric in ruin. You remember what Victor Hugo says of Napoleon in the Miserables--"Il gênait Dieu"; Wundt only _gêners_ his _confrères_; and whilst they make mincemeat of some one of his views by their criticism, he is meanwhile writing a book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no _noeud vital_ in his mental medulla oblongata, so that you can't kill him all at once.

But surely you must admit that, since there must be professors in the world, Wundt is the most praiseworthy and never-too-much-to-be-respected type of the species. He isn't a genius, he is a _professor_--a being whose duty is to know everything, and have his own opinion about everything, connected with his _Fach_. Wundt has the most prodigious faculty of appropriating and preserving knowledge, and as for opinions, he takes _au grand sérieux_ his duties there. He says of each possible subject, "Here I must have an opinion. Let's see! What shall it be? How many possible opinions are there? three? four? Yes! just four! Shall I take one of these? It will seem more original to take a higher position, a sort of _Vermittelungsansicht_[84] between them all. That I will do, etc., etc." So he acquires a complete assortment of opinions of his own; and, as his memory is so good, he seldom forgets which they are! But this is not reprehensible; it is admirable--from the professorial point of view. To be sure, one gets tired of that point of view after a while. But was there ever, since Christian Wolff's time, such a model of the German Professor? He has utilized to the uttermost fibre every gift that Heaven endowed him with at his birth, and made of it all that mortal pertinacity could make. He is the finished example of how much mere _education_ can do for a man. Beside him, Spencer is an ignoramus as well as a charlatan. I admit that Spencer is occasionally more _amusing_ than Wundt. His "Data of Ethics" seems to me incomparably his best book, because it is a more or less frank expression of the man's personal _ideal of living_--which has of course little to do with science, and which, in Spencer's case, is full of definiteness and vigor. Wundt's "Ethics" I have not yet seen, and probably shall not "tackle" it for a good while to come.

I was much entertained by your account of F----, of whom you have seen much more than I have. I am eager to see him, to hear about his visit to Halle, and to get his account of you. But [F.'s place of abode] and Boston are ten hours asunder by rail, and I never go there and he never comes here. He seems a very promising fellow, with a good deal of independence of character; and if you knew the conditions of education in this country, and of the preparation to fill chairs of philosophy in colleges, you would not express any surprise at his, or mine, or any other American's small amount of "Information über die philosophische Literatur." Times are mending, however, and within the past six or eight years it has been possible, in three or four of our colleges, to get really educated for philosophy as a profession. The most promising man we have in this country is, in my opinion, the above-mentioned Royce, a young Californian of thirty, who is really built for a metaphysician, and who is, besides that, a very complete human being, alive at every point. He wrote a novel last summer, which is now going through the press, and which I am very curious to see. He has just been in here, interrupting this letter, and I have told him he must send a copy of his book, the "Religious Aspect of Philosophy," to you, promising to urge you to read it when you had time. The first half is ethical, and very readable and full of profound and witty details, but to my mind not of vast importance philosophically. The second half is a new argument for monistic idealism, an argument based on the possibility of truth and error in knowledge, subtle in itself, and rather lengthily expounded, but seeming to me to be one of the few big original suggestions of recent philosophical writing. I have vainly tried to escape from it. I still suspect it of inconclusiveness, but I frankly confess that I am _unable_ to overthrow it. Since you too are an anti-idealist, I wish very much you would try your critical teeth upon it. I can assure you that, if you come to close quarters with it, you will say its author belongs to the genuine philosophic breed.

I am myself doing very well this year, rather light work, etc., but still troubled with bad sleep so as to advance very slowly with private study and writing. However, few days without a line at least. I found to my surprise and pleasure that Robertson was willing to print my chapter on Space in "Mind," even though it should run through all four numbers of the year.[85] So I sent it to him. Most of it was written six or even seven years ago. To tell the truth, I am _off_ of Space now, and can probably carry my little private ingenuity concerning it no farther than I have already done in this essay; and fearing that some evil fiend might put it into Helmholtz's mind to correct all his errors and tell the full truth in the new edition of his "Optics," I felt it was high time that what I had written should see the light and not be lost. It is dry stuff to read, and I hardly dare to recommend it to you; but if you do read it, there is no one whose favorable opinion I should more rejoice to hear; for, as you know, you seem to me, of all writers on Space, the one who, on the whole, has thought out the subject most _philosophically_. Of course, the experimental patience, and skill and freshness of observation of the Helmholtzes and Herings are altogether admirable, and perhaps at bottom _worth_ more than philosophic ability. Space is really a direfully difficult subject! The third dimension bothers me very much still.

I have this very day corrected the proofs of an essay on the Perception of Time,[86] which I will send you when it shall appear in the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" for October last. (The number of "July, 1886" is not yet out!) I rather enjoyed the writing of it. I have just begun a chapter on "Discrimination and Comparison," subjects which have been long stumbling-blocks in my path. Yesterday it seemed to me that I could perhaps do nothing better than just translate 6 and 7 of the first _Abschnitt_ of your "Tonpsychologie," which is worth more than everything else put together which has been written on the subject. But I will stumble on and try to give it a more personal form. I shall, however, borrow largely from you....

Have you seen [Edmund] Gurney's two bulky tomes, "Phantasms of the Living," an amazingly patient and thorough piece of work? I should not at all wonder if it were the beginning of a new department of natural history. But even if not, it is an important chapter in the statistics of _Völkerpsychologie_, and I think Gurney worthy of the highest praise for his devotion to this unfashionable work. He is not the kind of stuff which the ordinary pachydermatous fanatic and mystic is made of....

_To Henry P. Bowditch._

[Post-card]

CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 26_ [1887].

My live-stock is increased by a _Töchterchen_, modest, tactful, unselfish, quite different from a boy, and in fact a really _epochmachendes Erzeugniss_.[87] I shall begin to save for her dowry and perhaps your Harold will marry her. Their ages are suitable.

Grüsse an die gnädige Frau.

W. J.

_To Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 12, 1887_.

MY DEAR HARRY,--...I got back yesterday from five days spent at my sylvan home at Lake Chocorua, whither I had gone to see about getting the buildings in order for the summer. The winter has been an exceptionally snowy one back of the coast, and I found, when I arrived, four feet of snow on a level and eight feet where it had drifted. The day before yesterday the heat became summer-like, and I took a long walk in my shirt-sleeves, going through the snow the whole length of my leg when the crust broke. It was a queer combination--not exactly agreeable. The snow-blanket keeps the ground from freezing deep; so that very few days after the snow is gone the soil is dry, and spring begins in good earnest. I tried snow-shoes but found them clumsy. They were making the maple-sugar in the woods; I had excellent comfort at the hotel hard by; with whose good landlord and still better landlady I am good friends; I rested off the fumes of my lore-crammed brain, and altogether I smile at the pride of Greece and Rome--from the height of my New Hampshire home. I'm afraid it will cost nearer $2000 than $800 to finish all the work. But we shall have ten large rooms (two of them 24 x 24), and three small ones--not counting kitchen, pantries, etc., and if you want some real, roomy, rustic happiness, you had better come over and spend all your summers with us. I can see that the thought makes you sick, so I'll say no more about it, but my permanent vision of your future is that your pen will fail you as a means of support, and, having laid up no income, you will return like the prodigal son to my roof. You will then find that, with a wood-pile as large as an ordinary house, a hearth four feet wide, and the American sun flooding the floor, even a New Hampshire winter is not so bad a thing. With house provided, two or three hundred dollars a year will support a man comfortably enough at Tamworth Iron Works, which is the name of our township. But, enough! My vulgarity makes you shudder....

College begins tomorrow, and there are seven weeks more of lectures. I never did my work so easily as this year, and hope to write two more chapters of psychology ere the vacation. That immortal work is now more than two thirds done. To you, who throw off two volumes a year, I must seem despicable for my slowness. But the truth is that (leaving other impediments out of account) the "science" is in such a confused and imperfect state that every paragraph presents some unforeseen snag, and I often spend many weeks on a point that I didn't foresee as a difficulty at all. American scholarship is looking up in that line. Three first-class works, in point both of originality and of learning, have appeared here within four months. Stanley Hall's and mine will make five. Meanwhile in England they are doing little or nothing. The "psychical researchers" seem to be the only active investigators....

_To his Sister._

CHOCORUA, N.H., _July 2, 1887_.

DEAREST SISTER,--It is an unconscionable time since I have written either to you or to Harry. Too little eyesight, and too much use thereof, is the reason. I thought I should go wild during the examination period. I have now got some presbyopic spectacles and hope for an improvement. I think I've been straining my eyes for three or four months past by not having them on.

A short dictated letter from you came the other day, and has been sent back to Alice in Cambridge, so I cannot give its date. I am grieved in the extreme to hear of another breakdown in your health.... But I make no sympathetic comment, as you would probably "roar" over it. There is this to be said, that it is probably less tragic to be sick all the time than to be sometimes well and incessantly tumbling down again.

I thought of the difference in our lots yesterday as I was driving home in the evening with a wagon in tow, which I had started at six-thirty to get at a place called Fryeburg, 19 miles away. All day in the open air, talking with the country people, trying horses which they had to swap, but concluding to stick to my own--a most blessed feeling of freedom, and change from Cambridge life. I never knew before how much freedom came with having a horse of one's own. I am becoming quite an expert jockey, having examined and tried at least two dozen horses in the last six weeks; and I don't know a more fascinating occupation. The day before yesterday, I spent most of both forenoon and afternoon in the field under the blazing sun, sprinkling my potato plants with Paris green. The house comes on slowly, but in a fortnight we shall surely be inside of the larger half of it, and the rest can then drag on. Three or four men can't get ahead very fast. It has some delightful rooms, and, I have no doubt, will make us all happy for several years to come. Not for eternity, for everything fades, and I can see that some day we shall be glad to sell out and move on, to something grander, perhaps. For simple harmonious loveliness, however, this can't be beat....

What a grotesque sort of time you have been having with your Queen's jubilee! What a chance for a woman to give some human shove to things, by the smallest _real_ word or act, and what incapacity to guess its existence or to profit by it! One can see the ground for Bonaparte-worship, when one contemplates the results of the orthodox and conservative crowned-head education. He, at least, could have dropped an unconventional word, done something to pierce the cuticle. But the density of British unintellectuality is a spectacle for gods. One can't imagine it or describe it. One can only _see_ it....

W. J.

* * * * *

Such enterprises as the horse-swapping just alluded to were not always conducted with that circumspection which marks your true horse-trader. The companion of one search for a horse reported James as accosting a man whom he met driving along the road and asking, "Do you know anyone who wants to sell a horse?" At Chocorua everyone was willing to sell a horse, and accordingly the man answered that he "didn't know as he did," but what might James be ready to pay? James replied that he was looking for a horse "for about $150, but _might_ pay $175." There was a pause before the man spoke: "I've got a horse in my barn that would be just what you want--_for one hundred and seventy five_."

The buyer was ready enough to laugh over such an incident; but he could not mend his trustful ways. The great thing was to have the fun of poking about the country-side and of talking business, or anything else, with its people whenever occasion offered; and, after all, the horses James bought usually turned out to be sound and serviceable enough. Perhaps it was because he looked at every living creature with a discriminating eye, and had not been a comparative anatomist for nothing. In the end, too, he was suited by any horse that pulled willingly and was safe for man, woman, and child to drive. There were no motor-cars then, and few other summer residents or visitors at Chocorua. James's two-seated "democrat" wagon, full of family and guests, and often followed by a child on the pony and by one or two other riders, used to travel quietly along the secluded and hilly roads for many hours a day.

During this summer, and yearly during the next four, James found real rest and refreshment on his Chocorua farm. The conditions were simple and the place yielded him all the joys of proprietorship without involving him in responsibilities to cattle and fields. Anyone who knows central New Hampshire will realize how rudimentary "farming" in one of the most barren parts of rocky New England necessarily was. The glacial soil produced nothing naturally except woods and apple trees. But the country was very beautiful, and on his own acres James was lord of part of the Earth. Clearing away bushes and stones from one of the little fields near the house; causing something to be planted which, during those first years, always seemed as if it _must_ be responsive enough to grow; cutting out trees to improve the look of the woods or to open an interesting view; dragging stones out of the bathing-hole in the brook; buying a horse or two and a cow on some lonely roadside at the beginning of each summer--these were fascinating adventures.

James was an insatiable lover of landscape, and particularly of wide "views." His inclination was to "open" the view, to cut down obstructing trees, even at the expense of the foreground. In drives and walks about Chocorua he usually made for some high hill that commanded the Ossipee Valley or the peaks of the Sandwich Range and White Mountains. Most hills in the neighborhood were topped by granite ledges and deserted pastures, and each commanded a different prospect. So the expedition often took the form of a picnic on one of these ledges. Axes were taken along; permission was sometimes obtained to cut down any worthless tree that had sprung up to shut off the horizon.

Before the end of such an afternoon James was more than likely to have fallen in love with the spot and to be talking of buying it. Indeed he was forever playing with projects for buying this or that hill-top or high farm and establishing a new dwelling-place of some sort on it. He was usually restrained by the price or by remembering the housekeeping cares with which his wife was already over-burdened. But he actually did buy two--one near Chocorua and one on a shoulder of Mt. Hurricane in the Adirondacks; and about the Chocorua region there is hardly a high-perched pasture which he did not at some time nourish the hope of possessing.

Another consideration that usually deterred him from buying was the difficulty of combining hill-tops with brooks. He used often to bewail this dispensation of nature; for a vacation without a brook or a pond to bathe in was as unthinkable as a summer dwelling-place that did not command a splendid view was "inferior." The little house at Chocorua stood at no great elevation, but it was near the Lake, and the place boasted its own brook, with a little pool, overhung by trees, into which the cold water splashed noisily over a natural dam. Thither, rain or shine, James used to walk across the meadow for an early morning dip; and after a walk or a drive or a couple of hours of chopping, or a warm half-day with a book in the woods, he used to plunge into it again.

A few lines, through which breathes the happiest Chocorua mood, may be added here, although they were written during a later summer.

_To Henry James._

CHOCORUA, _July 10_.

...I have been up here for ten days reveling in the deliciousness of the country, dressed in a single layer of flannel, shirt, breeches and long stockings, exercising my arms as well as my legs several hours a day, and already feeling that bodily and spiritual freshness that comes of health, and of which no other good on earth is worthy to unlatch the shoe....

* * * * *

The next letter also rejoices over Chocorua, although it turns first to academic amenities. The correspondent addressed, now Sir Charles Walston, and Henry Jackson, both of the English Cambridge, had sent James two cases of audit ale.

_To Charles Waldstein._

CAMBRIDGE, _July 20, 1887_.

MY DEAR WALDSTEIN,--It never rains but it pours. The case of beer from _you_ also came duly. Day after day I wondered about its _provenance_, but your letter dispels the mystery. I had begun to believe that all the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford were going to vie with each other in wooing my appreciation of their respective brews. The dream is shattered but the reality remains. Five dozen is enough for me to fall back upon--in the immediate present, at all events.

As for that unknown but thrice-blest Jackson, Henry Jackson of Trinity (_dulcissimum mundi nomen_)--is that the way he always acts, or is he only so towards _me_? I thank him from the bottom of my heart, and swear an eternal friendship with him. If ever he is in need of meat, drink, advice or defence, let him henceforth know to whom to apply--purse, house, life, all shall be at his disposal. Such a magnanimous heart as his was ne'er known before.

I wish I knew his _Fach_! But my ignorance is too encyclopedic. He must be a very great philosopher. Goddard shall have some of the stuff.--Of course you mean George Goddard--I know him well.

This has been written in the midst of interruptions. I am back in Cambridge for only a couple of days, to send furniture up to my New Hampshire farmlet. You may play the swell, but I play the yeoman. Which is the better and more godly life? Surely the latter. The mother earth is in my finger-nails and my back is aching and my skin sweating with the ache and sweat of Father Adam and all his _normal_ descendants. No matter! Swells and artists have their place too. Farewell! I am called off again by the furniture. Remember me! And as for the divine Henry Jackson, thank him again and again. His ale is royal stuff. I will make no comparisons between his and yours. Ever affectionately yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

In explanation of the next letters, it should be said that in 1888 it seemed advisable to get the children into a warmer winter climate than that of Cambridge. Accordingly Mrs. James carried the three ("Harry," "Billy," and "Margaret Mary," aged respectively eight, five, and two years), and a German governess off to Aiken, South Carolina, for three months. James was thus left in the Garden Street house with no other member of the family except--for he counted as one--a small pug-dog named Jap. Dr. Hildreth, who is referred to, was a next-door neighbor, whose children were somewhat older than the James children.

_To his Son Henry (age 8)._

CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 1, 1888_.

BELOVED HEINRICH,--You lazy old scoundrel, why don't you write a letter to your old Dad? Tell me how you enjoy your riding on horseback, what Billy does for a living, and which things you like best of all the new kinds of things you have to do with in Aiken. How do you like the darkeys being so numerous? Everything goes on quietly here. The house so still that you can hear a pin drop, and so clean that everything makes a mark on it. All because there are no brats and kids around. Jap is my only companion, and he sneezes all over me whenever I pick him up. Mrs. Hildreth and the children are gone to Florida. The Emmets seem very happy. I will close with a fable. A donkey felt badly because he was not so great a favorite as a lap-dog. He said, I must act like the lap-dog, and then my mistress will like me. So he came into the house and began to lick his mistress, and put his paws on her, and tried to get into her lap. Instead of kissing him for this, she screamed for the servants, who beat him and put him out of the house. Moral: It's no use to try to be anything but a donkey if you are one. But neither you nor Billy are one.

Good-night! you blessed boy. Stick to your three R's and your riding, so as to get on _fast_. The ancient Persians only taught their boys to ride, to shoot the bow and to tell the truth. Good-night!

Kiss your dear old Mammy and that belly-ache of a Billy, and little Margaret Mary for her Dad. Good-night.

YOUR FATHER.

_To his Son Henry._

CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 27_ [1888].

BELOVED HEINRICH,--Your long letter came yesterday P.M. Much the best you ever writ, and the address on the envelope so well written that I wondered whose hand it was, and never thought it might be yours. Your tooth also was a precious memorial--I hope you'll get a better one in its place. Send me the other as soon as it is tookin out. They ought to go into the Peabody Museum. If any of George Washington's baby-teeth had been kept till now, they would be put somewhere in a public museum for the world to wonder at. I will keep this tooth, so that, if you grow up to be a second Geo. Washington, I may sell it to a Museum. When Washington was only eight years old his mother didn't know he was going to be Washington. But he did be it, when the time came.

I will now tell you about what Dr. Hildreth is doing. The family is in Florida, and he is building himself a new house. They are just starting the foundation. The fence is taken down between our yard and his, by the stable, and teams are driving through with lumber. Our back yard is filled with lumber for the frame of the house. It is to be cut, squared, mortised, etc., in our yard and then carried through to his.

I dined last night at the Dibblees'. The boys had been to dancing-school. I like their looks. All the boys and girls together kept up such a talking that I seemed to be in a boiler factory where they bang the iron with the hammers so. It's just so with them every day. But they're very good-natured, even if they don't let the old ones speak.

Say to Fräulein that "ich lasse Sie grüssen von Herzensgrund!"[88]

Thump Bill for me and ask him if he likes it so nicely.

Jap's nose is all dry and brown with holding it so everlastingly towards the fire.

We are having ice-cream and the Rev. George A. Gordon to lunch today. The ice-cream is left over from the Philosophical Club last night.

Now pray, old Harry, stick to your books and let me see you do sums and read _fast_ when you get back.

The best of all of us is your mother, though.

Good-bye!

Your loving Dad.

W. J.

_To his Son William._

18 GARDEN STREET, _Apr. 29, 1888_. 9:30 A.M.

BELOVED WILLIAMSON,--This is Sunday, the sabbath of the Lord, and it has been very hot for two days. I think of you and Harry with such longing, and of that infant whom I know so little, that I cannot help writing you some words. Your Mammy writes me that she can't get _you_ to _work_ much, though Harry works. You _must_ work a little this summer in our own place. How nice it will be! I have wished that both you and Harry were by my side in some amusements which I have had lately. First, the learned seals in a big tank of water in Boston. The loveliest beasts, with big black eyes, poking their heads up and down in the water, and then scrambling out on their bellies like boys tied up in bags. They play the guitar and banjo and organ, and one of them saves the life of a child who tumbles in the water, catching him by the collar with its teeth, and swimming him ashore. They are both, child and seal, trained to do it. When they have done well, their master gives them a lot of fish. They eat an awful lot, scales, and fins, and bones and all, without chewing. That is the worst thing about them. He says he never beats them. They are full of curiosity--more so than a dog for far-off things; for when a man went round the room with a pole pulling down the windows at the top, all their heads bobbed out of the water and followed him about with their eyes _aus lauter_[89] curiosity. Dogs would hardly have noticed him, I think. Now, speaking of dogs, Jap was _nauseated_ two days ago. I thought, from his licking his nose, that he was going to be sick, and got him out of doors just in time. He vomited most awfully on the grass. He then acted as if he thought I was going to punish him, poor thing. He can't discriminate between sickness and sin. He leads a dull life, without you and Margaret Mary. I tell him if it lasts much longer, he'll grow into a common beast; he hates to be a beast, but unless he has human companionship, he will sink to the level of one. So you must hasten back and make much of him.

I also went to the panorama of the battle of Bunker Hill, which is as good as that of Gettysburg. I wished Harry had been there, because he knows the story of it. You and he shall go soon after your return. It makes you feel just as if you lived there.

Well, I will now stop. On Monday morning the 14th or Sunday night the 13th of May, I will take you into my arms; that is, I will meet you with a carriage on the wharf, when the boat comes in. And I tell you I shall be glad to see the whole lot of you come roaring home. Give my love to your Mammy, to Aunt Margaret, to Fräulein, to Harry, to Margaret Mary, and to yourself. Your loving Dad,

WM. JAMES.

_To Henry James._

CHOCHURA, N.H., _July 11, 1888_.

MY DEAR HARRY,--Your note announcing Edmund Gurney's death came yesterday, and was a most shocking surprise. It seems one of Death's stupidest strokes, for I know of no one whose life-task was begun on a more far-reaching scale, or from whom one expected with greater certainty richer fruit in the ripeness of time. I pity his lovely wife, to whom I wrote a note yesterday; and also a brief notice for the "Nation."[90] To me it will be a cruel loss; for he recognized me more than anyone, and in all my thoughts of returning to England he was the Englishman from whom I awaited the most nourishing communion. We ran along on very similar lines of interest. He was very profound, subtle, and voluminous, and bound for an intellectual synthesis of things much solider and completer than anyone I know, except perhaps Royce. Well! such is life! all these deaths make what remains here seem strangely insignificant and ephemeral, as if the weight of things, as well as the numbers, was all on the other side.[91]

I have to thank you for a previous letter three or four weeks old, which, having sent to Aunt Kate, I cannot now date. I must also thank for "Partial Portraits" and "The Reverberator." The former, I of course knew (except the peculiarly happy Woolson one), but have read several of 'em again with keen pleasure, especially the Turguenieff. "The Reverberator" is masterly and exquisite. I quite squealed through it, and all the household has amazingly enjoyed it. It shows the technical ease you have attained, that you can handle so delicate and difficult a fancy so lightly. It is simply delicious. I hope your other magazine things, which I am following your advice and not reading [in magazine form], are only half as good. How you can keep up such a productivity and live, I don't see. All your time is your own, however, barring dinner-parties, and that makes a great difference.

Most of my time seems to disappear in college duties, not to speak of domestic interruptions. Our summer starts promisingly. How with my lazy temperament I managed to start all the things we put through last summer, now makes me wonder. The place has yet a good deal to be done with it, but it can be taken slowly, and Alice is a most _vaillante_ partner. We have a trump of a hired man.... Some day I'll send you a photograph of the little place. Please send this to Alice, for whose letters I'm duly grateful. I only hope she'll keep decently well for a little while. Yours ever,

W. J.

P.S. I have just been downstairs to get an envelope, and there on the lawn saw a part of the family which I will describe, for you to insert in one of your novels as a picture of domestic happiness. On the newly made lawn in the angle of the house and kitchen ell, in the shadow of the hot afternoon sun, lies a mattress taken out of our spare-room for an airing against Richard Hodgson's arrival tomorrow. On it the madonna and child--the former sewing in a nice blue point dress, and smiling at the latter (named Peggy), immensely big and fat for her years, and who, with quite a vocabulary of adjectives, proper names, and a mouthful of teeth, shows as yet, although in her sixteenth month, no disposition to walk. She is rolling and prattling to herself, now on mattress and now on grass, and is an exceedingly good-natured, happy, and intelligent child. It conduces to her happiness to have a hard cracker in her fist, at which she mumbles more or less all day, and of which she is never known to let go, even taking it into her bath with her and holding it immersed till that ceremony is o'er. A man is papering and painting one of our parlors, a carpenter putting up a mantelpiece in another. Margaret and Harry's tutor are off on the backs of the two horses to the village seven miles off, to have 'em shod. I, with naught on but gray flannel shirt, breeches, belt, stockings and shoes, shall now proceed across the Lake in the boat and up the hill, to get and carry the mail. Harry will probably ride along the shore on the pony which Aunt Kate has given him, and where Billy and Fräulein are, Heaven only knows. Returning, I shall have a bath either in lake or brook--doesn't it sound nice? On the whole it is nice, but very hot.

_To Miss Grace Norton._

[Post-card]

[CHOCORUA,] _Aug. 12, 1888_.

It would take G[uy] de M[aupassant] himself to just fill a post-card chock-full and yet leave naught to be desired, with an account of "Pierre et Jean." It is a little cube of bronze; or like the body of the Capitaine Beausire, "plein comme un oeuf, dur comme une balle"--dur surtout! Fifteen years ago, I might have been _enthused_ by such art; but I'm growing weak-minded, and the charm of this admirable precision and adequacy of art to subject leaves me too cold. It is like these modern tools and instruments, so admirably compact, and strong, and reduced to their fighting weight. One of those little metallic pumps, _e.g._, so oily and powerful, with a handle about two feet long, which will throw a column of water about four inches thick 100 feet. Unfortunately, G. de M.'s pump only throws dirty water--and I am _beginning_ to be old fogy eno' to like even an old shackly wooden pump-handle, if the water it fetches only carries all the sweetness of the mountain-side. Yrs. ever,

W.J.

The dying fish on p[in]s stick most in my memory. Is that right in a novel of human life?

_To G. Croom Robertson._

_Oct. 7, 1888._

...I am teaching ethics and the philosophy of religion for the first time, with that dear old duffer Martineau's works as a text. It gives me lots to do, as I only began my systematic reading in that line three weeks ago, having wasted the summer in farming (if such it can be called) and philosophizing. My "Psychology" will therefore have to be postponed until another year; for with as much college work as I have this year, I can't expect to write a line of it....

_To Henry James._

_Oct. 14, 1888._

...The Cambridge year begins with much vehemence--I with a big class in ethics, and seven graduates from other colleges in advanced psychology, giving me a good deal of work. But I feel uncommonly hearty, and shall no doubt come out of it all in good shape.... I am to have lots of reading and no writing to speak of this year and expect to enjoy it hugely. It does one good to read classic books. For a month past I've done nothing else, in behalf of my ethics class--Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Butler, Paley, Spinoza, etc., etc. No book is celebrated without deserving it for some quality, and recenter books, certain never to be celebrated, have an awfully squashy texture....

_To E. L. Godkin._

CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 15, 1889_.